RERUM
Been a long time gone. Suddenly & with surprising force, I was overwhelmed by boredom with the sound of my own voice. Have I got my Neruda right? The ceaseless voice, its tongue ‘a red fox barking in a box’. It seemed that I’d gone beyond that fatal point at which silence should fall; that point the other side of which lies only blather. Something that had puzzled me greatly – what it is that causes a flourishing weblog suddenly to cease functioning, stalled permanently at its last entry – became very clear. Creative inspiration, commitment to the pursuit of an argument, the urgent need to speak your truth to whoever might be importuned to listen - these imperatives can be subject to instantaneous cardiac arrest. Some bloggers return rejuvenated, others vanish, their broken links surviving only on unrevised sidebars.
I’m back in an upright position after a fortnight of defibrillation in the form of frenetic pre-moving house activity punctuated by languid evenings in front of crap television. Defibrillated I may be, but I’m not sure how effectively two weeks away have de-blathered me. I shall move forward cautiously, constantly on the lookout for the insinuation of yadda-yadda clauses into otherwise substantive documents. If found, it’s straight back to my corner of the sofa with Rosie on my lap for the mindless ‘nil by mouth’ pap of the soaps & sitcoms…
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I bought a new mobile ‘phone the other day. It was to replace the one I bought to replace the one I lost. Fired by an almost moral fervour concerning the cult of the mobile ‘phone, I had bought the cheapest replacement I could find. It was a small blue slip of a thing with minute keys, humble & modest amongst its more illustrious peers. No vast compendium of games, on board, no 15 gigabytes of non-stop music, no built-in multipixel camera, no brewing the tea & walking the dog, just simple telephony. It promised to do nothing more than enable its owner & one other to talk to each other across long distances. I felt very worthy, almost noble whenever, on hearing its reedy cry, I whipped out the tiny little chap in a public place. An honest son of toil in a decadent world, my mobile.
Sadly, my readiness to embrace the austere, the ascetic, the merely functional evaporated when it became evident that the ‘phone had a battery life of a sentence & a half (minus pauses for breath). I was forever re-inflating the poor exhausted little thing overnight. And the tiny speaker through which needle-thin voices were strained taxed hearing to the limit. Additionally, the accompanying handbook appeared to be written in a free translation from the Korean. When I found myself reflecting ruefully that I’d probably be better of with the original, I realised that the brief encounter had to come to an end.
I now own a Motorola V500, a palm-sized heavyweight like a pocket teleporter. With camera, WAP, Bluetooth &, of course, tea-making & dog-walking facilities. It has a loud, confident ring tone (although I’m searching via Google for a set of church bells), clear graphics & it glows with a spooky, spectral blue light. I am fatally compromised &, having crossed over to the other side, can never return…
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Today I finally finished Saturday by Ian McEwen. I slid gently off the last page with real regret. Writing of extraordinary elegance & clarity. No surging narrative or sequences of compelling action. Instead a spellbinding journey deep inside the constantly fluctuating consciousness of one individual. I was reminded – not in respect of style or content, but in terms of sheer absorption in the heart & mind of the protagonist – of the works of John Cowper Powys, for which I had a passion in my 20s (but which I would find unreadable now, I suspect).
Now I’m limbering up for Never Let me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest. The Remains of the Day is an all-time favourite & there are some similarities to McEwen in Ishiguro’s crystalline prose.
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I finally got down to watching Bowling for Columbine in one sitting last week. There are many unbidden flashbacks that occur in daylight hours but few more vivid than Moore’s interview with that grotesque old lizard Charlton Heston. It is with great sadness that I must let slip as a top ten historical movie, a massively underrated film from the mid-'60s, The Warlord. In fact, I am now a Heston conchie: if it's got the heartless, humourless bastard in it, I turn it off…
12:33:48 AM 
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